BIBLIOGRIND

“Can you read my palm?”“No.”“Can you read tea leaves.”“No.”“Do you look into a crystal ball.”“No.”“Well then, what do you do for this $5 reading?”“Order off the menu. When the food comes here, I’ll find your fortune in the eyes, the faces, the animals, the bodies that I see in the food.”“Wouldn’t that be reading the fortune of the chef who prepared the dish?”“No.”“Why not?”“You ordered the food. It’s how you came to that order, in your mind, that settles matters. There is no other.”

Short-answer, short-comment, dialogue is effective to communicate a single idea through the personalities of your characters. Allow your story to tell itself. Don’t allow “line-length” to dictate how your scene plays itself out.

The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.